Book Review: Dangerous Fun: The Social Lives of Big Wave Surfers

black spaces beyond their studios developing an expressive realism rather than promotional portraits. These were also part of a rebellion against the staid mores of the older generation and which increasingly crossed racial divides. Even so, one of the most poignant photos in the book is of Louis Armstrong in 1960 taken by Herb Snitzer on his tour bus. Already the most famous entertainer in the USA, Armstrong had been refused entry to a whites-only bathroom in Connecticut. Isolated, since the background is blurred, the image draws the viewer into Armstrong’s eyes as he stares directly into the camera. Snitzer captured and froze the weary defiance but also hurt and injury of racism. Jazz is a broad genre, and even in the period considered here, ranged from swing to the abstract experimental work of John Coltrane, which raises the much-debated question of the boundary between jazz/not jazz. This is touched on in Chapter 10 looking forward to newer hybrid forms, but is not particularly developed. It might have been interesting to consider Adorno’s critique of ‘jazz’, which referred largely to white swing in Weimar. This does though raise a further issue in relation to both music and photography of the autonomy of art as opposed to the subjectivity of its maker. Many who try to resolve the problem of subjectivity and objective meanings end up leaning one way or the other. Sight Readings is informed by a bold project of transcending the dichotomy but its ‘central problem’ is the photographer’s intentions as a starting point for deep interpretation and historical reconstruction (p. 359). This is done consummately but, in the process, perhaps leans more to the agency of the photographer than how cultural products take on their own autonomous life beyond their makers, so that the meanings of the images and the music they represent have subsequently been transformed. Really though a minor quibble. Sight Readings is a milestone in research on photography and American jazz.